GIPSIES.
Whether from India's burning plains,
Or wild Bohemia's domains
Your steps were first directed:—
Or whether ye be Egypt's sons,
Whose stream, like Nile's for ever runs
With sources undetected,—
Arab's of Europe! Gipsy race!
Your Eastern manners, garb, and face
Appear a strange chimera;
None, none but you can now be styled
Romantic, picturesque, and wild,
In this prosaic era.
Ye sole freebooters of the wood
Since Adam Bell and Robin Hood—
Kept every where asunder
From other tribes—King, Church, and State
Spurning, and only dedicate
To freedom, sloth, and plunder.
Your forest-camp—the forms one sees
Banditti like amid the trees,
The ragged donkies grazing,
The Sibyl's eye prophetic, bright
With flashes of the fitful light,
Beneath the caldron blazing,—
O'er my young mind strange terrors threw:
Thy history gave me Moore Carew!
A more exalted notion
Of Gipsy life, nor can I yet
Gaze on your tents, and quite forget
My former deep emotion.
For "auld lang syne" I'll not maltreat
Yon pseudo-Tinker, though the Cheat,
Ay sly as thievish Reynard,
Instead of mending kettles, prowls
To make foul havock of my fowls,
And decimate my hen-yard.
Come thou, too, black-eyed lass, and try
That potent skill in palmistry.
Which sixpences can wheedle;
Mine is a friendly cottage—here
No snarling mastiff need you fear,
No Constable or Beadle.
'Tis yours, I know, to draw at will
Upon Futurity a bill,
And Plutus to importune:—
Discount the bill—take half yourself
Give me the balance of the pelf.
And both may laugh at fortune.
Ibid.